Back home from a day of driving with my father! So--I'm tired out from the trip, gearing up for the semester, about to jet off to see my partner in the upper midwest (hopefully beating the January Terror Blizzard of '10)--basically I have 1,001 things I should be doing.
What do I do instead? I watch three back-to-back episodes of Tabatha's Salon Take-over (TSTo). For those who don't know, the Bravo reality-TV series features Tabatha Coffey, a platinum-blond Australian salon owner whom struggling salon owners invite in to critique and re-vamp their businesses. Like many Bravo shows, TSTo works by formula: Tabatha watches video of struggling salon, makes various exasperated and shocked observations, swoops in, tells everyone how and why they're in trouble, makes people angry/ashamed/weepy, and then wins everyone's hearts by introducing various innovations (sometimes impressive tricks of the trade; sometimes just commonsense suggestions), which saves the struggling salon from bankruptcy.
I don't think the show is any more or less well-done than any of the other accented-expert-gives-people-needed-wake-up-call (e.g., Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, Supernanny). I have no real interest in hair salons or hairstyling. And while I've grown to respect her pedagogical techniques (she's not all sassy British put-downs) I'm not going to go out to start a fanclub for Coffey.
Why did I watch three (count them!) hours of the darn show, then? I watch, I realize, because each episode showcases glowing moments of authoritative truth-telling. "You think things are like X," says Tabatha (or Jo, or Gordon, or what have you), "but I'm here to tell you that I know X, and this [gestures contemptuously] is definitely not X. It's more Y."
It's the same scene, really, as those I most like in shows such as The West Wing--where someone legitimately aware and empowered asserts a Hard Truth to someone who needs to hear it. The scene is even better when the someone being told really thinks he or she is cock of the rock (e.g., the salon owner, the top stylist, President Bartlett).
That dramatic moment--related, I think, to what Aristotle called anagnorisis ("the recognition")--just makes my little self-confidence nerves go all a-buzz. Self-assertion has never been a strong suit of mine. I have bad emotional reflexes. Usually I tend to under-react or react after the fact to slights or boundary violations that I should confront in the moment of their occurrence. At other times I turn my insult-radar up to high, unleashing all my pent-up "Let me tell you how it really is" at the wrong person, in the wrong time, about something that does not merit any such drama. Those few times where I have actually and maturely asserted a difficult truth feel not pleasurable but fraught with anxiety (will the person listen? will my relationship with them survive this confrontation?).
These shows, however, present me with the vicarious fantasy of effective truth-telling, where the Hard Truth gets told without passive aggression or sugarcoating, and--the fantasy part--where the Telling produces results. Inevitably, the recipients of the truth-telling scenes in those shows I like absorb the news, hurt and angry, perhaps, but ultimately surrendering to the epistemic authority (or perhaps just rhetorical authority) of the teller. "Tabatha really pissed me off," says the stylist being dressed-down, "but I realize she's right. I need to do X much better. The truth hurts, but it's important to hear."
How rare that reaction is in life! How much more often my attempts at righteous truth-telling result in the person ignoring me, exploding, or (worst of all) telling me how things really are and making me realize how foolish I was to think X was the case. How rarely do I myself react productively to being told hard truths! Truth-telling of the really satisfying kind presented on TV remains, well, the purview of TV shows. It's the product of editing, dramaturgy, acting, and direction.
But confrontation and truth-telling is nonetheless necessary. My sister (the counselor) often reminds me that confrontation and self-assertion function often more for the benefit of the asserter than they do for the listener. I cannot control how the other person might take my words, but this does not absolve me of the responsibility to make my position--here's how things are--plain to them. The person to whom I speak might recognize my truth, reject it, or sever ties with me. But side-stepping such confrontation can exact longer and deeper costs.
Certainly I see the wisdom of this kind of truth-telling in interpersonal relationships.
What about political relationships? More to my point on this blog, what about relationships within the body-politic that is the Church? My time in Oklahoma this last holiday break alerted me to a number of culture-war battlefields where I feel a particular stance by some person or group--especially one labeling itself Christian--demands from me a strong response. Certainly I wish I could don an accent and a platinum-blond wig and swoop in, giving to this or that person my authoritative take on where and how his or her stance is wrong.
Intra-Christian disagreements about culture war issues, however, differ from such a fantasy in two ways: 1) often the person I want to tell off sees his or her initial statement as the "difficult truth" that needs to be told. 2) I want the other person not only to listen to my counter-statement but to agree with it, to be convinced of it.
We are urged by the author of Ephesians to speak the truth in love. How, I wonder, does that lvoe manifest in moments of confrontational honesty, especially in and around evangelical culture war issues?
More tomorrow (hopefully--still more traveling in internet-dry places),
JF
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